Tag Archives: barack obama

I guess this is what Obama meant by fundamentally changing the USA, now he’s even allowing possible terrorists into the USA while claiming its to help them “flee a civil war”. We did this with Somalia to, and now those people are trying to pass Sharia Law and form their own country within the US.

The Department of Homeland Security on Monday issued new regulations that will allow more Syrian refugees to temporarily settle in the United States.

The department estimates that about 9,000 people will be eligible to come to America under the 18-month extension to March 2015 of the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Syrians. Another 2,600 or so Syrians already here will be able to apply to renew their status. The Obama administration first gave TPS designation to Syrian citizens and residents last year, and the status was set to expire on Sept. 30.

“The extension of the current Syria TPS designation and re-designation is due to the continued disruption of living conditions in the country that are a result of the extraordinary and temporary conditions that led to the initial TPS designation of Syria in 2012,” the Homeland Security Department said. “The extension is based on ongoing armed conflict in that region and the continued deterioration of country conditions.”

President Obama’s Friday meeting with a newly reformed privacy watchdog panel will take place behind the closed doors of the White House Situation Room, according to administration officials.

It’s the president’s first sit-down with the recently constituted and little-known Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, created nearly a decade ago but dormant for the entirety of the Obama presidency.

The White House released few details on the meeting agenda other than to say it will be held at 3 p.m. and will include the discussion of classified information such as the National Security Agency’s data and telephone record collection efforts, recently revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, former NSA employee.

White House spokesman Jay Carney on Friday reiterated that the president believes it’s vital to have a public debate about how to balance the respect for privacy rights with national security, and said the rebirth of the privacy board will play an important role as that conversation unfolds.

“We have seen in the wake of these unauthorized disclosures of classified information a developing debate about these issues. The president believes this is a worthy debate,” Mr. Carney told reporters, adding that Friday’s meeting is more than an informal “get-to-know-you session” and will include the discussion of serious issues.

Remember when Obama was constantly attacking Bush for things he now does 100x more intrusively? Remember when Obama claimed he cared about your privacy and these “illegal” wiretaps would never happen under him? Not only do they happen with phones, they happen with everything you do, even where you go and when!

If you tweet a picture from your living room using your smartphone, you’re sharing far more than your new hairdo or the color of the wallpaper. You’re potentially revealing the exact coordinates of your house to anyone on the Internet.

The GPS location information embedded in a digital photo is an example of so-called metadata, a once-obscure technical term that’s become one of Washington’s hottest new buzzwords.

The word first sprang from the lips of pundits and politicians earlier this month, after reports disclosed that the government has been secretly accessing the telephone metadata of Verizon customers, as well as online videos, emails, photos and other data collected by nine Internet companies. President Barack Obama hastened to reassure Americans that “nobody is listening to your phone calls,” while other government officials likened the collection of metadata to reading information on the outside of an envelope, which doesn’t require a warrant.

But privacy experts warn that to those who know how to mine it, metadata discloses much more about us and our daily lives than the content of our communications.

So what is metadata? Simply put, it’s data about data. An early example is the Dewey Decimal System card catalogs that libraries use to organize books by title, author, genre and other information. In the digital age, metadata is coded into our electronic transmissions.

“Metadata is information about what communications you send and receive, who you talk to, where you are when you talk to them, the lengths of your conversations, what kind of device you were using and potentially other information, like the subject line of your emails,” said Peter Eckersley, the technology projects director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties group.

Powerful computer algorithms can analyze the metadata to expose patterns and to profile individuals and their associates, Eckersley said.

“Metadata is the perfect place to start if you want to troll through millions of people’s communications to find patterns and to single out smaller groups for closer scrutiny,” he said. “It will tell you which groups of people go to political meetings together, which groups of people go to church together, which groups of people go to nightclubs together or sleep with each other.”

Metadata records of search terms and webpage visits also can reveal a log of your thoughts by documenting what you’ve been reading and researching, Eckersley said.

“That’s certainly enough to know if you’re pregnant or not, what diseases you have, whether you’re looking for a new job, whether you’re trying to figure out if the NSA is watching you or not,” he said, referring to the National Security Agency. Such information provides “a deeply intimate window into a person’s psyche,” he added.

Better watch out if you are a journalist, this seems to happen a LOT. Only 12 days after writing the Why Democrats Love To Spy On Americans, Michael Hastings suddenly dies in a high speed car accident. This is the man who ended General McChrystals career after he exposed the criticisms the general had of Obama.

Michael Hastings was really only interested in writing stories someone didn’t want him to write — often his subjects; occasionally his editor. While there is no template for a great reporter, he was one for reasons that were intrinsic to who he was: ambitious, skeptical of power and conventional wisdom, and incredibly brave. And he was warm and honest in a way that left him many unlikely friends among people you’d expect to hate him.

Michael, who died at the age of 33 in a high-speed wreck in Los Angeles early Tuesday morning, wasn’t like any reporter I’ve ever worked with. He found conflict constantly, but never by accident. We fought, first, over the adjectives in his stories — “discredited” was a favorite — and then over his theories, which were typically the opposite of whatever I was hearing from my Washington sources. In the meantime I marveled at his talent and at the thing I hadn’t particularly expected: his generosity.

The talent first. That is the reason Michael’s death was news to so many people who didn’t know him personally, the reason his stories hit a nerve almost without fail.

Michael’s journalistic roots were in the 1970s, in gonzo writers like Hunter S. Thompson who flung their bodies at the story, and often got hurt. He had been badly hurt once: His fiancée was killed in Baghdad in January 2007, when he was a Newsweek reporter there, and her death was still utterly raw to him when he published his first book, I Lost My Love In Baghdad.

And then the other part: He knew how to tell it. He knew that there are certain truths that nobody has an interest in speaking, ones that will make both your subjects and their enemies uncomfortable. They’re stories that don’t get told because nobody in power has much of an interest in telling them — the story, for instance, of how a president is getting rolled by his generals.

There is perpetual handwringing in journalism about how to make Worthy topics interesting to a broad audience. The simple fact is that Michael had discovered the answer: Make it about power and sex and personality and conflict (because, by the way, it usually is) and — and here’s the real trick — draw a straight and clear line between the vibrant reporting and the point. His most vivid scenes, set in the carnage of Baghdad at its worst days, or in the grim light of pay-per-view in an Iowa hotel room, were never gratuitous. Michael’s most famous story, the one that got General Stanley McChrystal fired, was a great yarn, but it was also about something: A military leadership that had turned its tactical sophistication inward, and trapped a president it disdained into a war he didn’t want to fight. The story helped push the American government to pull out of Afghanistan, not because a general said some bad words, but because those words conveyed the general’s sense of superiority to his civilian masters.

This has been exposed for a long time now, why in the world would Obama want to arm these people with American weapons if they have already vowed to attack the US and its allies with them unless he agrees with it?

In the country’s largest city of Aleppo, they were advancing on the army to try to take key intersections. In Maarat al Numan, a strategic city on the highway between Aleppo and Damascus, they were laying siege to a military base. In Ras al Ayn, in the country’s northeast, they captured a strategic border post, allegedly summarily executing a number of Syrian soldiers they had trapped on a base there in the process. In Deir al Zour province, in the country’s southeast, they were at the fore as rebels captured parts of Syria’s oil infrastructure and laid siege to an artillery base near the city of Mayadeen in hopes of capturing the weapons inside.

“Our financial support is greater than other groups, and our faith makes us more effective fighters,” said Mahmoud, explaining why the group had grown so quickly. He said the financial support came from individual donors, not directly from any government.

The mujahedeen groups also appear to have clearer structures than the military councils, whose leadership is sometimes less than obvious as newer defectors of higher rank demand control from less senior officers who’ve been fighting against Assad longer.

Car bombings have also increasingly killed civilians in Damascus neighborhoods sympathetic to the government. The first operation Mahmoud’s group supported was a suicide bombing by a Libyan man against an army base north of here.

Mahmoud said he saw no reason to hold elections if Assad falls.

“Eighty percent of Syrians want Islamic law,” he said.

Many fighters said they were aware of the accusations about Nusra’s links to al Qaida. But they generally discount the importance of those ties when speaking with journalists.

“When we finish with Assad, we will fight the U.S.!” one Nusra fighter shouted in the northeastern Syrian city of Ras al Ayn when he was told an American journalist present. He laughed as he said it and then got into a van and drove off, leaving the journalist unable to ask whether it had been a joke.

Yet another example at the types of people Democrats have financing them getting away with threats and harassment. Even as they constantly claim conservative groups are actually the violent ones. Yet another example of how liberals use transference to get away with doing what they claim their political foes are doing.

Unionized local employees repeatedly harassed and intimidated non-union workers of a private disaster cleanup firm that won a government contract to restore Long Island, New York, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

The vice president of the union even made threats against the wife and kids of one of the workers. That worker felt it necessary to call the police and pursue other security measures to protect his family, a source told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

After Hurricane Sandy devastated the New York and New Jersey shoreline in late October, Looks Great Services (LGS) won a bid to haul away debris, clear roads and remove damaged trees. New York’s Nassau County hired the company to complete $70 million worth of repairs.

Soon thereafter, representatives of Local 138, a union representing heavy equipment operators, began visiting construction sites, demanding that the company hire unionized employees to help with the job.

But LGS was paying its workers — some of whom came from out of state — market-based wages, rather than union wages, in compliance with federal law regarding disaster recovery jobs.

“If the contract is union, we are union, if it’s not, we’re not,” said Kristian Agoglia, president of LGS, in an interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation.

His answer didn’t satisfy the union, which began making inflammatory statements to workers at LGS construction sites.

Yet another example of Obama and his cronies helping Pro-Democrat, radical Muslim groups with ties to terrorist groups while attacking conservatives. This proves Obama is more scared of conservatives than groups who are funded by terrorist groups.

While the IRS was hassling any nonprofit group with the word “patriot” in its name, it was rubberstamping exemptions for “Islamic” groups, even organizations that violate disclosure laws.

Worse, it was even finding favor with nonprofits tied to terrorism — namely, the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, which not coincidentally is yoked to the Democratic Party.

Despite being blackballed by the FBI, which still suspects it’s fronting for Hamas, and despite failing to file annual tax reports as required by federal law, CAIR apparently has found friends in high places at the nation’s powerful taxing authority.

Last year, in the middle of the national election season, the IRS quietly agreed to reinstate CAIR’s tax-exempt status, allowing it to resume raising tax-free donations just in time for Ramadan, a key time for Muslim charitable giving.

According to the Religion News Service, the IRS in June 2012 sent CAIR’s national office a letter stating the nonprofit had regained its exemption after losing it the previous year. Several GOP lawmakers had asked for an audit of CAIR after a book exposing its internal operations, “Muslim Mafia,” reported the Islamist outfit had skipped filing IRS Form 990s for at least three years in a row.

Its like a broken record, everything Obama and his liberal media allies were claiming was all “racist lies” turns out to be true. When will people get it? This man and his cronies have done nothing but lie and then attack those who expose the lie as racist, radicals, liars, and many other names.

It’s called the Affordable Care Act, but President Barack Obama’s health care law may turn out to be unaffordable for many low-wage workers, including employees at big chain restaurants, retail stores and hotels.

That might seem strange since the law requires medium-sized and large employers to offer “affordable” coverage or face fines.

But what’s reasonable? Because of a wrinkle in the law, companies can meet their legal obligations by offering policies that would be too expensive for many low-wage workers. For the employee, it’s like a mirage — attractive but out of reach.

The company can get off the hook, say corporate consultants and policy experts, but the employee could still face a federal requirement to get health insurance.

Many are expected to remain uninsured, possibly risking fines. That’s due to another provision: the law says workers with an offer of “affordable” workplace coverage aren’t entitled to new tax credits for private insurance, which could be a better deal for those on the lower rungs of the middle class.

Some supporters of the law are disappointed. It smacks of today’s Catch-22 insurance rules.

“Some people may not gain the benefit of affordable employer coverage,” acknowledged Ron Pollack, president of Families USA, a liberal advocacy group leading efforts to get uninsured people signed up for coverage next year.

“It is an imperfection in the new law,” Pollack added. “The new law is a big step in the right direction, but it is not perfect, and it will require future improvements.”